Search Engines on Duplicate Content

What is SEO?

SEO is called as search engine optimization. It is the process of affecting the visibility of website or the content of website in search engine unpaid’s results. This is often referred as an “organic” or “natural” results.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate contents are generally referred as the repeated contents across the various domains or within the same domain. The content may be repeated exactly as it is(Full match) or partially match. These contents may not be the malicious or deceptive content in the origin, but to increase the ranking in the google search engine or bing search engine the content will deliberately copied across the domains.

This will lead the google index to display duplicate results or the same content is repeated in the google search engine when the visitors search for the particular keywords.

What are the biggest issues of duplicate content?

Search engines will not have any clue to find which content is original.

Search engines doesn’t know which link or article to rank higher in the search results.

Common SEO mistakes that most of the users does which lead the search engine to treat their content as duplicate content.

Domain variants which will lead in content duplication within the same domain if not considered properly. Eg: http://www.example.com and http://example.com is treated as different by the search engines.

Having Printer friendly version of articles or posts. If your articles or posts have an printer friendly version of the URL then search engines might treat it as duplicate.

Any URL parameters or different session id on the url parameters for each users might also lead in content duplication.

Below are few steps that can be taken to avoid content duplication.

Use 301 Permanent Redirection

To differentiate between www and non www domains you can use 301 permanent redirection.

Use Canonical URL’s

Set canonical URL tag for every post and article. This makes search engines easily identify that same content exists in other URL. This can be mobile URL or non WWW URL. Checkout the below eg on how to add canonical tag in the page.

Canonical tag example: Lets say there is a webpage http://www.example.com/index.html . Make sure that you add the below canonical tag in the head so that it indicates google that both the pages belongs to same domain. Canonical tag : <link href=”http://example.com/index.html/” rel=”canonical” />

Be Consistent while linking the URL’s

While linking the urls in your articles or posts make sure it will be consistent. For example, don’t link to http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/ or http://www.example.com/index.html .

Set preferred domain in the webmaster

Make sure to set the preferred domain in the web masters like google, bing, yandex etc., This will help search engines to know which domains it should show in the search results.

Use NoIndex and nofollow wherever necessary

For the article which has printer friendly URL’s make sure to set noindex and nofollow so that search engines will not crawl those urls and content duplication can be avoided easily.

What are the best tools to check duplicate content or Plagiarism Checker online?

There are various online plagiarism checker tools available over the internet. There are few best tools that can be used to find out the duplicate content.

Siteliner

Siteliner is one of the best free tool which can be used to check duplicate content on your site. Siteliner also has other features like broken link checker, internal page rank, xml sitemap generation and report generation. The free version of siteliner is limited to analyze upto of 250 pages of your website. The premium version can analyze around 2500 pages seamlessly.

Copyscape

Copyscape is again the best tool and a free online plagiarism checker. This is one of the great tool to know who is stealing your content over the internet. Again copyscape comes with a premium option which has multiple features like offline content analysis, scan upto 10000 pages.